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Suspicions raised over election date betting

TONY EASTLEY: To home now, and claims of a plunge on betting for the Federal Election date just before the date was announced last week have raised suspicions that someone tried to use inside information for profit.

Sportsbet says it shut down the market for the Federal Election date when it received a suspiciously high number of bets for a September poll on the morning that Julia Gillard's announced it.

Simon Lauder reports.

SIMON LAUDER: The bets weren't huge, but there were enough of them to raise suspicions.

HAYDN LANE: There was a couple of different punters were having bets in the low hundreds of dollars.

SIMON LAUDER: Haydn Lane is a spokesman for Sportsbet, which was running an online market for bets on the poll date. Mr Lane says a flurry of bets on a September poll caused the odds to plunge on Wednesday morning.

HAYDN LANE: So with the odds being 167 into $1.50, you know, they're standing to make either 67 per cent or 50 per cent return on their investment, so it wasn't as though they were getting set to win thousands but certainly hundreds is accurate.

But the reason we suspended betting, it was more to get an understanding of what's happening, if there was any news or if there was potentially a leak, because with that particular market, there hadn't been really much activity at all over the previous couple of weeks and then we start taking bet after bet.

And it was less than 10 bets in total but it was in short succession when we haven't really had much for you know a little period prior to that. So it just looked a little bit suspicious to us.

SIMON LAUDER: So obviously it raised suspicions that someone had some inside information?

HAYDN LANE: Potentially and look, we obviously weren't aware of any inside information but the fact that we took sort of you know bet after bet and again, there weren't you know tens or hundreds of these bets but they were in a succession.

So the prudent thing for us to do was to suspend the market until we could get a better gauge of what was going on, if anything. As it turned out, there was an announcement shortly afterwards.

SIMON LAUDER: Aside from a handful of political allies, Julia Gillard took most people by surprise last Wednesday when she announced the date of the election, which raises the question - who had the inside running?

HAYDN LANE: It does. Look it's, from our point of view, it's not... you know, it's not a great concern. If it is for others then that's another matter. In this case we weren't actually sure, but we thought the prudent thing to do was to suspend it and as it was, it was proven correct.

SIMON LAUDER: Independent Senator Nick Xenophon has drafted legislation which would ban betting on politics. He says it's open to corruption.

But Haydn Lane says Sportsbet has safeguards in place to protect the integrity of political gambling.

HAYDN LANE: You could argue that some people had some inside information here and took advantage of that. What we do in that case is put low limits in place.

SIMON LAUDER: It also seems that someone did profit from that information if that is indeed what happened. I presume those bets were honoured.

HAYDN LANE: Absolutely, yeah, without a question. So we've already paid out on September being the date for the next election. But all bets for now have been paid.

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